How to Curate Content and Make it Work for Your Brand

Content is the currency of social web. It is what gets people to your website, your social channels and ultimately convinces them to give you their business.

As publishers, we need to continually evaluate options to present the absolute best information to our followers. And, this becomes a tedious process when you have millions and millions of pieces of content floating around on the World Wide Web. As great as it is to publish and share original content, it is not always possible to match up to the demands of this attention-deficit-disorder generation by fleshing out new and fresh pieces of content by the minute.

Enter, content curation.

What Is Content Curation?

Content curation is the act of sorting and going through large amounts of data to present only the best pieces of content in an organized and meaningful fashion.

How Can It Help You?

Sharing original content is great, but curating and sharing content published by others can be an excellent source of building credibility for your brand. The main intent behind curating content is to help your audience’s access large amounts of diversified information in the easiest way possible.

When done right, content curation can go a long way in helping you maintain meaningful relationships with your audiences by delivering highly targeted bits of information to them. Because, let’s accept it, as readers, none of us like the silent treatment. We like brands to talk to us on an ongoing basis and build a relationship and not just come to us simply when there is a product / service to be sold.

A recent research conducted by Curata analyzed over one million articles found that among the million,

13 percent of posts are original content

87 percent are third party content (meaning it is curated, gathered with the intent of sharing)

Original content gets 17 percent more click-through when used in combination with third party content (less clicks on sites that only offer original content)

Before you begin curating your content, ask yourself –

What type of content would interest my audiences?

What information is the most critical for my audiences to know?

Historically, what type of content has been most successful for my brand?

1. Know What to Share

Having an understanding of what your brand’s voice on social media is, is a crucial step in content curation. The articles and content that you decide to share through your brand’s channels should seem like a natural extension of your brand. Content that comes across as forced and deliberate will not stand out.

2. Be Timely and Selective

The key reason for content curation is to skim and collate only the type of content that is (a) aligned to your brand and (b) suited to your audience’s interests. Feeding your fans timely, but irrelevant, information can kill your content strategy and do you more bad than good. Be selective and pick out only the best pieces. Tip? Zoomph gives you information on the exact keywords that your audiences are talking about when they interact with your brand on social. This can be extremely crucial information to have when you are publishing and promoting your curated content.

3. Curated Social Hubs

You spent all this time curating content and making sure you pick the type of content that resonates the most with your audiences, but how do you present this in a way that compel your audiences to consume it and share it? One good way is through Social Hubs.

Social hubs are being extensively used by companies to centralize content into one place for easy consumption. With a social hub you have the flexibility to host branded content, curated content, as well as user-generated content for a more cohesive presentation.

A great example of this is the Sea Bags social media hub that is sourced from user-generated content.

At Zoomph we like taking things a notch above. So, all our social hubs are backed with not just beautiful imagery and styles but smart moderation capabilities as well. The Zoomph Social Media Manager app, you can moderate content on the go and engage with your biggest influencers and brand advocates in real-time. Read more about it here.

4. Evaluate Your Success

Publishing content on social media and not tracking its success is a common mistake that most brands make. If you cannot determine how your content is faring you cannot learn about what’s working and not working. Content curation heavily relies on your audience’s media consumption habits. The more you know about your audience’s consumption habits the better your chances of putting out content that will resonate with them.

Zoomph gives you in-depth analytics that give you information on what time during the day gets your brand the most engagement, your audience’s preferences, top locations in the country that your audiences are participating the most from and lots more.

5. Cross Promote Your Content

Your audiences are present on not one but multiple platforms. Having the knowledge of which platforms get you the most engagement and traffic can do wonders for your content strategy. Top that off with a good cross-promotion tactic and your content is bound to gain traction on social media. For example, if you decide to publish your curated content through a blog, be sure to promote it via Twitter, Facebook and any other shared media properties.

6. Include CTAs

An impactful call-to-action (CTA) can encourage your readers to hang around for a few minutes longer and perform a desired action before jumping off. But before you decide to include a cookie cutter CTA on every single page, take into consideration your reader’s journey – where is he coming from, and what step is he most likely to take after he leaves the page? The idea is to craft appropriate CTAs based on what your readers will be looking for at a certain point in your content.

Closing Thoughts

Content curation can be a great supplement to your content strategy. Today, content marketers are operating with a content mix that incorporates 25% curated content. The other two parts include original content (65%) and syndicated content (10%). Hence, if you are shying away from curating content as part of your content strategy, you are doing only 75% of what your competition is doing. And, you definitely do not want to do that. Best practices in the industry credit smart content curation with higher SEO and higher engagement. But, it will only get you these results if you do it right.

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